Through this class, other VHS classes and my Mentor's class I have been able to find more ways to make my online classes more interactive. This to me is the most important key I have been able to take from the VHS classes. Our online students need to be pulled in and entertained a bit which honestly is not any different then in a f2f class. The teacher must find ways to engage and hold interest. During the course of this series I have been introduced to many new and engaging ways to use online tools and I have been able to bring those tools to my high school and to my online course at Thomas. I am very excited and energized with this new bag of tricks! I start a new trimester with Blogging in the Classroom on April 5th. Egad that is awfully soon, no rest for the wicked I guess. I plan to have students work with blogging and wiki software and hope to encourage an almost paperless classroom. In the fall I will be teaching 'Computers Across the Classroom' and plan to share tons of the online tools like xtranormal, wikis, blogs, and screencast, along with many of the readings I have been introduced to in Best Practices. My biggest challenge is to know when enough is enough. I want to give my students everything, all the tools, but that can be overwhelming to some and so I need to go through all that I have learned and to decide what fits best and when. Another huge challenge is to use all that I have learned before I forget it. :) We have covered so much information in these VHS classes, that I now need some time to absorb and use it all. Probably the biggest resource available to me is Moodle. Thomas College uses this software and we at MSAD54 also have a Moodle server. This software alone is full of tools that our teachers can use. The goal will be to get them to build online units and or courses that are fully interactive and not just a way to communicate or pass out papers. We will also be using Wikis and Social Bookmarking quite a bit. With Moodle, Wikis and Social Bookmarking as a base the plan is to spice it up with some of the cool software like xtranormal, screencast, jing, etc.
Through this class, other VHS classes and my Mentor's class I have been able to find more ways to make my online classes more interactive. This to me is the most important key I have been able to take from the VHS classes. Our online students need to be pulled in and entertained a bit which honestly is not any different then in a f2f class. The teacher must find ways to engage and hold interest. During the course of this series I have been introduced to many new and engaging ways to use online tools and I have been able to bring those tools to my high school and to my online course at Thomas. I am very excited and energized with this new bag of tricks!
I start a new trimester with Blogging in the Classroom on April 5th. Egad that is awfully soon, no rest for the wicked I guess. I plan to have students work with blogging and wiki software and hope to encourage an almost paperless classroom. In the fall I will be teaching 'Computers Across the Classroom' and plan to share tons of the online tools like xtranormal, wikis, blogs, and screencast, along with many of the readings I have been introduced to in Best Practices.
My biggest challenge is to know when enough is enough. I want to give my students everything, all the tools, but that can be overwhelming to some and so I need to go through all that I have learned and to decide what fits best and when. Another huge challenge is to use all that I have learned before I forget it. :) We have covered so much information in these VHS classes, that I now need some time to absorb and use it all.
Probably the biggest resource available to me is Moodle. Thomas College uses this software and we at MSAD54 also have a Moodle server. This software alone is full of tools that our teachers can use. The goal will be to get them to build online units and or courses that are fully interactive and not just a way to communicate or pass out papers.
We will also be using Wikis and Social Bookmarking quite a bit. With Moodle, Wikis and Social Bookmarking as a base the plan is to spice it up with some of the cool software like xtranormal, screencast, jing, etc.